Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has been given a tick of approval by social media experts for his performance in an “ask me anything" session on notorious Internet community Reddit on Thursday evening. The PM gained points for humour and net savvy, but was marked down by some for dodging tricky questions and his embarrassing “cool dad" tendencies.

In one of the more daring attempts to garner social media approval of the current election campaign, the Labor leader took a move from the Barack Obama playbook by agreeing to make a personal appearance on the site, which brands itself as the “front page of the Internet."

The AMA sessions are often held by various celebrities and provide an unfiltered, and often offensive, stream of commentary and questions, some of which the subject chooses to answer. Green Senator Scott Ludlam and MP Adam Bandt have both previously appeared.

The Prime Minister’s session kicked off at 6pm (AEST) having been announced just over an hour earlier. However, the short notice did not have an impact on the reaction, as 3292 comments were registered within the first 18 minutes alone, at which point the PM had made nine responses of his own. The session was one of the most widely discussed topics on Twitter, with various related hashtags trending all evening, such as #ruddit #reddit, #krudd, and #labor.

The Prime Minister advises an American poster about the dangers of Dropbears
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Whether it was a pre-planned move or not, Mr Rudd gained early kudos from the Reddit community by making what was believed to be the first official policy announcement on the forum. Responding to a question every bit as challenging as a back-bencher Dorothy Dixer in Question Time about what Labor plans to do regarding more funding for mental health care, the PM had a new “headspace" policy ready to reveal.

“I was going to announce this in the next couple of days, but since you’ve asked I’ll tell you now. If we’re re-elected, a government I lead will put in a $34 million investment to open another 10 headspace centres so that we have 100 across the country," Mr Rudd wrote. “We’ll also be expanding e-headspace so people can get access to advice online too. That’s an important investment – money we want to put in so that we have services that can help."

Reaction on the site was immediately positive, as users welcomed the policy and gloried in the fact that the world had heard about it first on Reddit, from where it was picked up by TV news. To mark the occasion, one user made a new version of the website’s robot logo, with Mr Rudd’s head super-imposed.

“Reddit is an incredibly brave move as a forum as conversation can quickly snowball into abuse and it is not typically the place where a politician will go to have structured conversation," Ntegrity director Richenda Vermeulen said.

Left-leaning audience

“The audience on Reddit is generally to the far left, more so than on any other social platform, so he was a much more suitable candidate for the site than Tony Abbott. If Tony were to do this he would likely be beaten up on the NBN."

Ms Vermeulen said that, because of the amount of conversation, it was hard to track the key themes of the discussion. However, she said it was obvious that the audience was young, technically savvy and international as well as local.

She said the main negative comments about Mr Rudd’s performance came from the Cardinal Sin for the young – being seen to be trying too hard to be cool.

“Many were saying this was Rudd’s attempt to be cool and it came off like ‘your dad trying to be cool’, and some others were saying that this was just Rudd copying Obama, and not that original," Ms Vermeulen said.

However, she said, the majority of users during the session appeared impressed that the PM was trying to engage and was posting like an expert on the site. He also made a clear attempt to humanise his image by answering a fair share of more light-hearted questions and making jokes.

These included responding to a question from an American user about his favourite Australian things with an answer about fictional Dropbears and Dropwombats, posting a picture of his dearly departed cat, Jasper, and replying to a user called j3za dog using the name Krudd dog.

A good performance

“Overall I think Kevin did extremely well, his interactions were memorable and highly shared and multiple hashtags around the forum trended," Ms Vermeulen said.

“If it was him answering all his questions tonight, then his years of social media experience came through. Not many politicians could pull this off, as most have a PR person using the medium."

Kristen Boschma, general manager of Aegis Media’s specialist social media agency The Social Hatch, said that although there were only 51,000 registered Australian users on Reddit, it was a powerful community, which was vocal and active across many social media platforms.

She said Mr Rudd’s session could be viewed as a success because it topped the websites “hot list" and attracted over 6000 comments. However she said the format of the forum meant he had been able to dodge any topics he wanted to avoid.

“Kevin Rudd did a good job of answering the questions he could, but was accused in the forum of avoiding questions and answering like a politician."

The PM avoided answering questions on a number of topics, most notably the US National Security Agency’s PRISM program to snoop on the data of internet users.

CEO of social web technology and analytics company DIGIVIZER Emma Lo Russo, said it had been a great initiative for Mr Rudd to take on Reddit, although she felt a longer notice period would have given Reddit users a better opportunity to vote up the best questions for his attention.

After the Reddit session she said that while the session on Reddit was valuable, it was important that the political parties tracked the resulting commentary that emerged on other platforms like Twitter.

“What I hope is done by both parties is some serious analysis of the conversations, issues, sentiment and who is speaking," she said.

“The point here should be beyond the tickbox that he was social and engaging but importantly he was responding to what the community thought important."